We recently moved into a a house (built in 1999) which has had a lot of unskilled "improvements" done to it.
In one of the bathrooms, a photoelectric motion sensor was installed to control the overhead light. We were seeing extremely weird behavior from this sensor, like it was turning on when we turned lights on in the room above it (but when no motion was going on in the bathroom.)
Anyway, yesterday I had the power off in the house so I decided to replace the problematic sensor with a simple switch. (This is the first light switch I've tried replacing; my experience in the past has been limited to replacing receptacles.)
I opened the box, which is a 3-gang box, left-to-right 1) a GFCI outlet, 2) a switch which controls an exhaust fan, and 3) the motion sensor on the far right.
When I looked at the motion detector, I found (to my surprise) that it wasn't grounded. The middle switch (which controls an exhaust fan), on the other hand, had 2 separate green wires attached to the ground screw.
So, in installing the new switch, obviously I wanted it to be grounded. There was no unused free-floating ground wire in the box, so I decided to unhook one of the two ground wires from the middle switch and attach it to the new switch... leaving one of the ground wires attached to the fan switch and the other ground wire attached to the light switch.
Does this sound like a kosher thing to do? Is there a reason why two grounds would need to be attached to a single switch? I'm assuming all ground wires are essentially equivalent?
Also, the simple light switch I installed didn't indicate which screw was supposed to be hot and which was neutral... they both looked exactly the same. The wires attached to the motion sensor were both black (not one black and one white) unlike receptacles I've replaced in the past.
So, I just attached one of the black wires to the top screw and one to the bottom screw. It seems to be working, but I'd love confirmation that I haven't done something terribly wrong.
Thanks for any help!
In one of the bathrooms, a photoelectric motion sensor was installed to control the overhead light. We were seeing extremely weird behavior from this sensor, like it was turning on when we turned lights on in the room above it (but when no motion was going on in the bathroom.)
Anyway, yesterday I had the power off in the house so I decided to replace the problematic sensor with a simple switch. (This is the first light switch I've tried replacing; my experience in the past has been limited to replacing receptacles.)
I opened the box, which is a 3-gang box, left-to-right 1) a GFCI outlet, 2) a switch which controls an exhaust fan, and 3) the motion sensor on the far right.
When I looked at the motion detector, I found (to my surprise) that it wasn't grounded. The middle switch (which controls an exhaust fan), on the other hand, had 2 separate green wires attached to the ground screw.
So, in installing the new switch, obviously I wanted it to be grounded. There was no unused free-floating ground wire in the box, so I decided to unhook one of the two ground wires from the middle switch and attach it to the new switch... leaving one of the ground wires attached to the fan switch and the other ground wire attached to the light switch.
Does this sound like a kosher thing to do? Is there a reason why two grounds would need to be attached to a single switch? I'm assuming all ground wires are essentially equivalent?
Also, the simple light switch I installed didn't indicate which screw was supposed to be hot and which was neutral... they both looked exactly the same. The wires attached to the motion sensor were both black (not one black and one white) unlike receptacles I've replaced in the past.
So, I just attached one of the black wires to the top screw and one to the bottom screw. It seems to be working, but I'd love confirmation that I haven't done something terribly wrong.
Thanks for any help!